No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Dear Steph,
I think I write you too often! I realized I should thank you, as it
seems as though reading High Infatuation served as a catalyst to
ignite an appetite for adventure/mountaineering literature I didn’t
know I had! I can’t get enough, and I can’t pick a favorite. Do you
have any suggestions for must-reads to put on my list?

Gratefully,
Katie

Dear Katie,
Of course you don’t write me too much! I love getting letters! And I am truly honored to hear that my book tossed you into an adventure reading frenzy. Whenever people ask me about mountaineering books, I tell them about No Picnic On Mount Kenya, by Felice Benuzzi. It is an amazing story, a true one.

In 1938, Felice was a young law school graduate, and applied for a post in Italy’s Colonial Service. They posted him in Ethiopia. World War II started, the British invaded, and Felice became a prisoner of war in a remote British POW camp in Kenya. He was 31. It was a very depressing situation, and from the camp, he was able to see Mount Kenya.

“Sometimes at the moment of reveille, when you open your eyes once more only to find yourself a prisoner, you have not the courage to accept the day. You close your eyes again hoping to snatch a few more moments from the land of dreams.

The night sky was clear. There was a smell of good earth in the air such as I had seldom noticed in Africa. I was thinking “The future exists if you know how to make it” and “It’s up to you”, as I turned the corner of my barrack at the exact spot from which I had seen Mount Kenya for the first time. Now it was visible again and in the starlight it looked even more tantalizing than in daylight. The white glaciers gleamed with mysterious light and its superb summit towered against the sky. It was a challenge. A thought crossed my numbed mind like a flash.”

Felice started to have a very crazy dream–to organize a climbing expedition from inside the camp, make all of his own equipment, escape the camp and summit the mountain…..and then return! His topo was a label showing a drawing of Mount Kenya that he took from a food tin. Everything else, ice axes, crampons, everything, was laboriously and secretly crafted inside the camp. The dream grew. Felice assembled a team, with many different tasks. Metal had to be acquired, gear designed and engineered, the escape planned, the climbing team prepared. A community effort grew among them, and this gave a feeling of hope and energy to everyone involved.

“The more I considered the idea of escape, the more I realized the magnitude of the task I had set myself. Should we be able to climb without a long period of acclimatization in the thin air of 17,000 feet? How should we make the actual climb? Whom should I ask to accompany me? How could we get out of the camp and in again? These and other problems kept my mind fully occupied. I found it fascinating to elaborate, in the utmost secrecy, the first details of my scheme. Life took on another rhythm because it had a purpose.”

It’s an amazing story, and a beautifully Italian one, both in its purity and its telling. Felice actually wrote the book in English, and his language is totally captivating. Sometimes when I read this book, I feel so touched I get tears in my eyes. The metaphor is inescapable. And what could be more absolutely pure, for the love of climbing, than to see a mountain from a prison camp and want nothing more than to climb it? There would be no glory, no achievement, nothing like that–only the risk of punishment if he was found out! The idea to climb Mount Kenya was purely creative, and came completely from within Felice’s imagination, with no external encouragement or suggestion. Felice wanted to climb the mountain because he wanted to climb it. He was a climber. He wanted to climb and to be free.

Please Katie, read this book!
xx Steph